Russ Alger is biding his time. It pays to be patient in McMurdo Bay, since nothing
comes easy in Antarctica. Fortunately, Alger is on his sixth visit to this scientific
outpost, and he knows the ropes.

During his first trip, in 1994, he helped scout the first trail to the South Pole.
Alger was younger then, and tougher: a necessity for three months of tent camping
in a white, subzero landscape crisscrossed with invisible crevasses that could swallow
a snowmobile whole, just like that.

This time, however, Alger is not straying far from McMurdo. The director of Michigan
Tech’s Institute for Snow Research is here to make another snow road better. It’s
a fifteen-mile stretch from Scott Base (New Zealand’s research center) to the Pegasus
runway, where supplies and people arrive in old cargo jets.

Alger will use a rarified groomer he and his colleagues developed at Michigan Tech’s
Keweenaw Research Center. Called a snow paver, it has the near-magical ability to
turn snow into solid roadway. All Alger needs is a little shop time to make a few
improvements and repairs. But McMurdo has tons of broken vehicles, so there’s always
a wait.

He’s here with friend and coworker Joel Kunnari, who manages the winter test course
at the Keweenaw Research Center. Kunnari, better known as Toby, is an expert on snow
roads in his own right. Plus, he knows the equipment better than anyone.

Alger and Kunnari have been trying to stay busy for three days while they wait for
the repair shop to open. They catch up on paperwork, check out some research projects,
and, on a walk in weather cold enough to freeze tears, visit the hut of Robert Falcon
Scott.

The hut was built in 1902 and was abandoned after the ill-fated explorer perished
during his return trip from the South Pole. It’s an eerie place; there’s still a dead
seal outside, a pile of whale blubber, and hay for the expedition’s long-gone ponies.

Finally a spot opens up in the repair shop, and they bring the snow paver into the
(heated!) building, where they install a hydraulic power pack. What with sundry Antarctic
delays, it takes four days to get the paver up and running.

The next step is to hitch the paver to a tractor and haul it out to a test site. After
grooming about a hundred feet, they spy red fluid spattered on the snow. Says Alger,
“We had a tractor breakdown right off the bat.”

Chalk up another day’s delay, which involves filling a fifty-five-gallon drum with
anti-freeze-pink snow for safe disposal. Then they head out in the quasi-repaired
tractor. It runs but now lacks a heater core, so the temperature in the cab is about
the same as the temperature outside: 15 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Despite near-frozen feet, they persevere. Finally, they are able to pave a new section
of the road from Scott Base to the Pegasus runway.

“It’s a perfect piece of road for us: it’s new, and it really needed help,” Alger
says. “They want to be able to travel that in rubber-tired vans at about twenty-five
miles an hour.”

The paver works by first chewing up the snow with a miller drum, which smashes the
ice crystals so they will stick together. It’s followed by a vibrating compactor,
which gets all the air out of the snow, compressing it to make a pavement. “We mess
around with how the vibrator works to try to make this snow pavement as homogenous
as possible,” says Alger.

This involves constant tweaking and testing. They build a short road to test different
processing techniques and see how the surface strength changes with time. “We hope
to find out what works best,” says Alger.

How well does it work? After paving, their 38,000-pound tractor is sitting pretty
on its cleats, perched on top of the snowy surface.

McMurdo crews have been building pretty decent roads for decades, but to get a good,
solid surface using conventional means can take months. Alger aims to meet or outdo
their quality in a few days, and he’s succeeding. With his time in Antarctica waning,
he measured the strength of an existing road and compared it to a stretch groomed
with the snow paver. The snow paver surface was far tougher, even though it had been
created just a few days before.

“I was skeptical, so I tested it in two different places and found the same thing,”
Alger says. “Very cool, and very interesting. And, as usual, I needed more time than
I had to finish the science.”

Roads are all very well and good, but Alger has another vision for the snow paver
that could revolutionize transport to and from Antarctica. He’d like to build a full-size
runway.

Now, air transport is via C130s with skis. “They are old, and the maintenance is expensive,”
says Alger. “And the planes are small; their capacity isn’t the greatest.” Newer,
wheeled planes could haul more and bigger stuff more cheaply. They might even be able
to touch down at the end of the Earth.

“There’s interest in landing bigger and newer planes at the South Pole and other remote
areas,” says Alger. All they need is a good runway—not much different from the road
he and Kunnari have just built.

Could you really land a big jet at the South Pole, where the snow is about 9,000 feet
(2,700 meters) thick?

“I think we can,” Alger says. “I just have to find somebody who believes me.”

Michigan Technological University is a public research university, home to more than
7,000 students from 54 countries. Founded in 1885, the University offers more than
120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering,
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social sciences. Our campus in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula overlooks the Keweenaw Waterway
and is just a few miles from Lake Superior.